Policewoman fined £1000 for illegally accessing files

Published on Wednesday 22 July 2009 09:52

A POLICEWOMAN who illegally looked up information about her friends on police computers has been fined £1,000.

Anna Wong, 26, a constable with Lothian and Borders Police, accessed details about members of the Chinese community while working in the Capital.

Wong resigned from the force last month and will now not face a police misconduct hearing.

The court was told the force is now supervising the training of new officers and is retraining existing police on their use of the Data Protection Act.

Wong, originally from Hong Kong, pleaded guilty to 28 breaches of the Data Protection Act at Edinburgh Sheriff Court earlier this year.

Sentencing her yesterday, Sheriff Elizabeth Jarvie QC said she was guilty of a "very serious breach of trust".

Wong joined the force in August 2005 and was posted at St Leonard's police station.

She was allowed limited access to the Scottish Intelligence Database as part of her job as a uniformed community patrol officer.

For more than a year, from March 2006 to June 2007, she looked up information on Chinese people on the database.

Wong claimed she did not know the information was protected and said other officers knew she was looking at the data.

Wong was suspended on full pay in January 2006.

She was originally charged with 54 offences but the Crown accepted her plea of guilty to 28 of them.

Her solicitor, David O'Hagan, said Wong had begun "innocently" looking for information about two people she knew.